Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, is a game conference organized by the authors of
Penny Arcade. (If you don’t read Penny Arcade – you
heathen! – read
Maulik’s quick
intro.) They
created their own conference because, in their words, “there was an event we
wanted to go to that did not yet exist.” I was skeptical, but they turned out to
be right – PAX combined elements of E3,
GDC, Comicon, playing xbox with
your buddies, playing D&D or
Magic with your buddies, and even watching
movies.

The unifying theme, of course, was games. This was perfect for
Maulik and me – we’ve spent vast amounts of our lives playing different video
games, and we still intensely follow gaming culture and news, but we don’t have
nearly as much free time to play games any more. So an event like this, where
we could totally immerse ourselves in games for a weekend, was perfect.